“I’m not sure I know what AirPlay is.” —
Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn A. Britt
I have a feeling that this quote will be a fun one to look back on in a few years. Disruption often blindsides.
Front-lit Kindle Due In July -
While Amazon clearly controls the e-reader space, Barnes & Noble continues to beat them to the punch on key technologies. First, it was an Android-based color tablet. Then it was the front-lit e-ink reader.
Amazon has to react, probably faster than they’d like — they’re pushing out a new Kindle not even a year after the last one was released.
Update: As Soroush Khanlou points out, B&N did the touch e-ink reader first as well.
THE iTV MAY BE COMING; EVERYONE WRITE BULLSHIT AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE!!!! -
Whoops.
Nice takedown of nonsense by Philip Elmer-DeWitt.
iOS 6 “Sundance” And The Sunsetting Of Google Maps
Small App Developer, Welcome To Your Hell -
Kim-Mai Cutler caught up with Hong Kong mobile app developer Animoca and notes that they test against 400 different Android devices. And they’d do even more — but many are no longer for sale.
Just look at the picture.
Cutler:
But imagine the long-tail of developers! Imagine the people who make the roughly 500,000 apps in the Google Play store. Total nightmare.
Right, for a big app house, this is very annoying, but doable. For a small team of app developers, this is impossible. Many pick the top 3 to 5 Android phones and stick to those when it comes to testing. Unfortunately, there are so many quirks across devices that it leads to a shit ton of bugs or full-on incompatibility.
“Total nightmare” is too kind. It’s total hell.
Well, Jim Dalrymple beat me to making fun of this, but what the hell, it’s Friday.
Earlier today, a thread starting passing around the Internet pointing out something worth a chuckle: when you ask Siri what the best smartphone is, it responds with the Nokia Lumia 900. The cyan version from AT&T, to be exact.
That’s it — end of debate! Shut Apple down and pay the money back to the shareholders. The Lumia 900 is clearly killing off the iPhone. Well, except if you consider sales. And user happiness. But whatever, Siri says so!
But wait. Does Siri even say so? After a series of never-ending clicks, I believe I was able to trace this “story” back to its roots. Dalrymple linked to AppleInsider, which links to TheNextWeb (hi Robin!), which links to ZUnited, which links to WMPoweruser. (CNet tried to insert itself into the conversation too, but well, it was this guy.)
Appropriately, it was a game of telephone that led to “Which is the best cellphone ever?” evolving into “what is the best smartphone ever?” Along the way, there were several reports of different answers — for example, I get nothing when I ask about the best smartphone ever and I get “I think you’ve already answered that question, MG.” when I ask for the best cellphone ever. Cute.
But people definitely are seeing the Lumia 900 pop up, the screenshots prove it! How could Apple let such a thing fly? Because it has nothing to do with Apple. The answer comes from Wolfram Alpha, Siri’s top data partner. And the fact of the matter is that in this case, the data sucks.
Wolfram Alpha passed the Lumia 900 to Siri simply because it’s the first on this list. But if you look closely at that list, you’ll note that several phones receive the highest “5” rating — 29 of them, by my count. And that list includes three models of the iPhone (two different versions of the iPhone 4S — the 64GB white model from Verizon and Sprint, sorry, AT&T). They’re simply not the first listed.
But again, this list is shit. It’s data from Best Buy based on user ratings. The Lumia 900 in question is “#1” with a whopping 5 user reviews. Number 2 on the list is this phone — I mean, just look at it! — which has a whole one five-star user review. Number 3 on the list is the HP refurbished Touchpad. Yes, the Touchpad. Number 3 best smartphone ever.
Need I go on?
iPhone was Japan's best-selling smartphone in 2011 -
It’s just too bad “the Japanese hate the iPhone”. They just hate it so much.
(Did I beat Gruber to the joke?)
Mark Gurman:
According to trusted sources, Apple has an incredible headline feature in development for iOS 6: a completely in-house maps application. Apple will drop the Google Maps program running on iOS since 2007 in favor for a new Maps app with an Apple backend. The application design is said to be fairly similar to the current Google Maps program on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, but it is described as a much cleaner, faster, and more reliable experience.
The biggest step yet in the de-Googlification of iOS.
Yet another subtle, but important advantage Apple has over competitors: their products are all over popular television shows and films — and Apple doesn’t pay a dime for such placement. The creative talent uses them because, well, they use them.
I mean, did you see Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol? It’s one big iAd — but again, not paid for by Apple. (Though Pixar alum Brad Bird may have played a role in that.) It’s a billion times better than any ad. It’s something money could literally not pay for.
This is also interesting, Peter Burrows and Andy Fixmer reporting:
In the 1990s, Apple’s PowerBook laptops included a company logo on the lid that faced the user sitting at the computer. When the lid was opened, the logo was upside down. Holtzman knew this was inconvenient to filmmakers and had stickers printed to cover the actual logo and have it appear correctly onscreen. A few years after Steve Jobs returned in 1997, he flipped the logo for good.
Hard to believe the logo was ever upside down, but I remember it. It looked incredibly stupid.
The "No Compromises" OS Is Anything But -
So, Mozilla and Google are upset because Firefox and Chrome won’t be able to run on Windows RT. But isn’t that obvious? For all the talk of “no compromises” out of Redmond, that’s exactly what Windows RT is: a compromise.
It’s a less-powerful version of Windows 8 that needs to be more tightly controlled to be able to run on less powerful ARM chips. Again, that means compromises. One of them is apparently browser control.
And Microsoft can probably do this because they’re a total non-player in the tablet space right now. While Mozilla and Google obviously think this should fall under the “browser choice” antitrust stuff from the 90s, this is clearly different. Windows RT is not going to have a monopoly over the market in any way, shape, or form. At least not anytime soon.
John Gruber brings up a good question:
What if Windows 8 for ARM, instead of being called “Windows RT”, were instead called, say, “Metro OS”? Would that make a difference? Is Dotzler arguing that Microsoft should not be permitted to ship a version of Windows that locks out third-party browsers, or that Microsoft should not be permitted to ship any OS that locks out third-party browsers?
In light of what Apple has done with iOS, it’s not clear how you can actually make the second argument. As such, it would be humorous if Microsoft continuing to use the “Windows” brand (even when they probably shouldn’t) came back to bit them in the ass here (but I don’t think it actually will).